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| Moderated by: Lord Marcovan | Page: 1 2   |
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RICKC300 Guardian1000© Member
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Shortly after graduating high school in Southern California and before starting my college education I quit my job, took all the money I had saved and spent an entire year prospecting for gold which was a past time I had shared with my Dad for years. I vowed I wouldn’t return until I had found a pound of gold. I built a new bellows type dry washer, bought a used 3 inch dredge, loaded my old Ford truck with all the gear I thought I would need, my rottweiler and headed north… I found just a hair under 3 ounces of gold from July thru September (about an ounce a month). Fun for sure but this was not going to make me rich. October was a really good month; I found a nugget weighing in at 16 grams with my metal detector and then found a vein of clay that yielded over 3 ounces in 2 weeks before it just disappeared. I sold that one nugget to a jeweler (you may not know it, but decent sized nuggets with eye appeal can bring 5 times gold value or more) I got 1100.00 for the nugget and still had a little cash left over from my savings and just over 6 ounces of gold to my name. I decided to head east to Colorado, my Grandfather had told me how he worked in a gold mine as a young man back in the 20’s and panned gold on his one day off trying to strike it rich. I wanted to find some Colorado gold too. Dummy me should have thought about that a little more, a dumb 18 year old heading towards the Rocky Mountains in November. Needless to say, after a few weeks it was too cold to do much prospecting without turning blue in the cold water. I got just over a half ounce of that elusive Colorado gold before deciding to head back west to warmer climes. I poked around a little bit in Northern Arizona and visited Carson City and Reno and found a couple of old smelters bars of silver with my detector before I got snowed upon and headed south for warmer temps. I ended up in Randsburg California on December 7th and started dry washing on some BLM land there. This was close enough that my Dad would drive the 6 hours and come dig some holes of his own on the weekends too. I was finding gold but nothing like I had been finding up north, this was pretty small stuff, not much more than flakes but a fair amount of it. When I got a decent spot going I would run the dry washer for a half hour and dump the “good” stuff into a bucket to pan through later on when I lost daylight. I would stop and pan every 4th tray just to make sure I was still getting gold and not digging through somebody else’s tailings where they had already taken the gold out. I was working 8-10 hours per day and only left once a week to run into town for supplies and call home. I told Mom I would be home for Christmas unless I hit a really hot streak like I had earlier in Northern California. Well, December 22nd, the day before I was going to head home, I hit that streak. I had been working the side of a hill in a gulch for a while and was getting some pretty decent gold when I hit bedrock, I started uphill, but the gold got scarce so I turned around and headed back downhill and was starting to find more and more gold the deeper I got into the gulch while following the bedrock. I stopped for my 4th tray as usual and as I was panning it out I knew I had something special, I still had about 2 cups of black sand in my pan and I could already see gold while working it down. I use a square pan with riffles when I pan, it is like a mini sluice box and much faster than a conventional pan (not to mention very forgiving if you get a little excited) as I was working the heavy black sand out I was seeing more and more gold in the riffles. When I finally got the sand out I just sat there in stunned silence. I poured the gold out into my catch bowl, drained the water off and ran to get my scale. That one run produced 1.35 ounces, not grams, OUNCES! So much in fact that I ran my tailings again later because I was afraid I may have overloaded my dry washer and lost some of the gold. Since I was on BLM land and if I left, someone else could show up and dig where I left off and I didn’t want that so I decided to keep working through the night by lantern until my glory hole ran dry. I kept working until the sky was just turning blue on the eastern horizon and I was still pulling a good amount of gold out when I checked every fourth tray. I decided I couldn’t leave so I left my tent and all my equipment there, tied the dog to the dry washer, hopped in the truck and drove 15 miles to town and called home. Mom was worried at first about getting a phone call from me a little before 5 in the morning but after I explained what was happening and that I wouldn’t be home for Christmas unless the hole dried up suddenly on the 24th. She understood and bless her soul, wished me good luck and a Merry Christmas! I high tailed back to my site and grabbed a couple hours of sleep before going back to work. About 8am old man Tom showed up, he owns the claim just on the other side of the gully I was working in and asked if I had struck it rich over the night. I told him I was getting some pretty good color (but not how much) and that I was trying to finish the run before heading home for Christmas. He gave me a knowing look and said “Y’all hit something good to work all night like ya did and leave yur dog to guard camp while you went to town before the sun comes up. Ya got any food here? Not much food, I said as I handed him that bottle of gold from that one special run. I had only met him a little over a week earlier but he is one of those people that you can’t help but like and trust. When I handed him that bottle he said something along the lines of Boy Howdy, Butter me up and call me a biscuit! I woulda worked all night too if’n I was finding that much of the heavens here on earth. He then told me to sit still a sec and went to his old 4WD Bronco and came back carrying a paper bag, a wood box and a gallon of Coleman fuel. He pointed at my camp stove, “Can I?” I told him sure not knowing what he was doing. He filled the tank, pumped it up, lit the burners, opened the box and pulled out an old cast iron skillet and a coffee pot already filled with water and stuck them both on the stove. He then opened the bag and pulled out a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs and a can of ground coffee. He put some grounds in the pot, put the whole package of bacon in the pan and started cooking. When the bacon was crisp he took it out, put it on a paper plate, cracked 6 eggs into the bacon grease and took 2 of the egg shells and tossed them in the coffee pot “ keeps the grounds out of the cups”… If you’re interested let me know and I will finish this story on how my hunt for a pound of gold turned out… Happy hunting! Rick
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member  Robertson Shinnick
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Welcome, Rick! I'm glad you're here now! I'm at work, just stealing a minute or two of goofoof time at the moment, so I haven't read the story yet. But I will!
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member Robertson Shinnick
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Don't forget to link this story up to the story contest at the top of the forum. Or I'll do it, when I don't have to dash off. Seeya- I look forward to your tale.
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librtyhead Original500© Member 
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Cool story!!! 
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24HourNut Administrator  Body pillows rock!
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RICKC300 wrote:
I am very interested! 
 The best human beings start good new topics and vote on the better posts. |
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member Robertson Shinnick
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Yeah, spill it!
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member Robertson Shinnick
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found a couple of old smelters bars of silver with my detector THAT sounds fascinating. What'd they look like?
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librtyhead Original500© Member
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What do eggshells taste like? 
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RICKC300 Guardian1000© Member
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Part two! I had never heard of that before, putting egg shells in coffee. I was thinking OK, now I am going to have little bits of egg floating in my coffee instead of grounds at the bottom of the cup, yummy! Surprisingly, it works, the old percolator type coffee pot with the old metal mesh for the grounds always leaves some real fine grounds in the cup but his didn’t and no egg taste or bits either. Anyway, he fried up 6 eggs, each over medium (I still can’t do 3 at once in one skillet without breaking at least one yolk, and he did SIX)! He served each of us 3 eggs, a half pound of bacon with some grilled toast cooked right over the flame which he then buttered. While we were eating he proceeded to crack another 3 eggs in the pan and scramble them and then left them in the pan off the heat after they cooked (I didn’t ask, I was still looking for egg in my coffee). When we were done eating he scraped the scrambled eggs onto the bacon plate and gave them to Athena (my dog) who wolfed them down in about 3 bites and then ate the plate because of the bacon grease that had soaked into it. I said she was faithful, I never claimed intelligent… We got back to the subject of gold hunting, dry washing in particular and he told me he liked the bellows type like mine and had used one for years but in order to really move a good amount of dirt or if the dirt was a little damp nothing beat a blower type. Then he looked over my dredge and sluice box and we talked about wet hunting and then we got on the subject of panning. Have you ever used a square pan before? I asked. He looked at me like I was nuts, I chuckled and put a shovel full of my “good stuff” into my pan and submerged it in my wash bin loosening the sand and rocks around with my hand and then started rocking it back and forth under water and then I started pouring off the rocks and sand working it back and forth continuously until I had it down to the black sand and gold, about a minute later I handed him the pan with nothing but about a tenth ounce of gold in it. He made some exclamation of sweet Mary and the beauties again (I wish I’d written all of his sayings down, I heard some of the most colorful, funny and outrageous things come from that mans mouth) but I am getting ahead of myself. He looked at the pan, looked over at the bucket and asked is that from last night? I told him it was and how I stopped every fourth run to check for color before continuing on. What about that bottle you showed me earlier? That was from one run at the start of my glory hole I replied. Sweet Jesus, Christmas has come early for ya! I got out my other pan and dumped another shovel full into it and handed it to him, he did just like he had watched me do and in just a few minutes had it worked down to about another 10th ounce of gold, He laughed and said I gotta get me one of these! They make the little buggers multiply like rabbits in there! I laughed again, Come on Tom, let’s pan this bucket out before I start digging again. I could see in his eye he wasn’t going to go anywhere before knowing how much gold was in that bucket anyway so I figured I could cut my panning time in half and have another empty bucket before getting back to the digging. I grabbed my scoop and emptied out the dirt and rocks from the wash bin, added a few more drops of dish soap and set another empty pan down on the milk crate between us. We started panning, I went a little faster than he did at first and had my pan down to gold before he did and just poured it into the other empty pan and refilled my pan and started panning again. He got his down and emptied it into the pan too. These pans are pretty quick like I said and it wasn’t long before he was panning as fast as I was and in about 45 minutes he was pouring the last of the sand and rocks from the bucket into his pan as I was finishing mine up. A few minutes later he poured the last of the gold into the pan and I poured off the muddy water and refilled it with some from a jug that already had dish soap in it and washed it down getting the last few stray pieces of sand out until there was nothing but gold in clear water left. I poured off the water and handed it over to him. That is 5 ounces or a little more he said. I carried the pan over to my folding table, I pulled my scale out and poured the gold into it and started moving the weight bar up. Dang he was good! It weighed in at 5 and ¼ ounces. I did some math in my head adding the 1.35 ounces plus already in my bottle, the other gold from up north and Colorado and realized I had got my pound of gold in 6 months (precious metal is weighed in Troy ounces and there is 12 ounces to a Troy pound). I was doing the math in my head and thinking maybe I could do this for a living after all! Tom was smiling… He new what was going through my young mind (or at least I thought he new). Well young man, ya better get back to work. I am going to run back to my place but I’ll be back in a bit with some stuff for ya. Do ya have a gun? He asked. That kind of stopped me short for a second and I thought maybe I had missed something. I told him yeah, I got a 12 gauge (that I could legally carry in California at age 18) and a .45 (this I couldn’t legally carry but had been raised with the saying I would rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6 any day of the week). Good he said, don’t go flashing that stuff around, you never know who may want it more than you do. He also told me to hide most of it and just keep a little bottle for show if someone comes around checking to see if you are having any luck. I told him I would do that (I already had been doing that). He bid me good luck as he loaded his box back in his Bronco and drove off. I filled the gas tank, fired up the engine and started digging again. I did 2 runs of half an hour each before checking my third run. It weighed out at a 10th ounce so I was still doing really well. I ran three more runs and checked the forth, I panned out about the same amount (I didn’t weigh it this time). Just as I was walking back to my dry washer I heard Athena bark and then I heard a vehicle, it was Tom coming back hauling an old pickup bed made into a trailer behind his Bronco. He pulled in next to my truck and climbed out. Ya still gettin color? It’s still there I said, maybe not as heavy as last night but still pretty good. I brought a couple things to make life easier on ya. Give me a hand and help me unload will ya? I walked over to his trailer (he had plywood sides built up and I couldn’t see in before he opened up the back door) He had a blower type dry washer, a generator and a spinner in there. Not to mention shovels, pick hammers and something I was wondering about, a shop vac. Ya sweeping the rock when you can’t dig anymore? I was and told him I so. This does better he said, you breaking up the loose bedrock too? With my shovel I said. We carried that generator over to by the table, the blower type dry washer over to my digging grounds after we moved mine out of the way. He said, you are doing good but let me show a little something OK? Sure I said. He fired up his dry washer (much quieter than mine) and handed me my shovel grabbed one of his and said let’s dig. He tossed a shovel full in and it went through it in nothing flat, come on dig! I started digging, tossing shovel after shovel in and that wonderful machine kept up with us. Mine would have been loaded up by now and I would be leaning on my shovel waiting for it to catch up. We dug as much in 10 minutes as I had been running in 2 runs of a half hour each. HOLY CRAP! I have got to get one of these things, I’ll be the king of all prospectors and retire by the time I’m 30 I thought! We dug another 10 minutes or so and then he grabbed a broom and swept clean about 5 feet of the rock we had just unburied while I kept feeding the blower. He beckoned me over and swept his sweepings into my shovel. I walked it over and put it in the blower tossed in another shovel of dirt and went back for more of the sand he swept up. I kept doing this until he had the rock swept clean. He walked over, shut off the motor and asked “Whatcha ya think”? I laughed and told him about my thoughts earlier when we had first started. It was his turn to laugh then. He showed me how to open up the blower and empty it into a bucket. Let’s pan he said. I carried the bucket up to my wash bin and cleaned it out again. We each poured about a ¼ of the bucket into a pan and went to work. He told me to just stop when I got it down to the heavy sand and gold. We panned that bucket in less than 5 minutes that way. We both could see a decent amount of gold in the sand so we knew it was a good run. He pulled the starter on the generator plugged in his spinner and turned it on. Tilted it back and poured the sand and gold into it. Then he grabbed an extension cord and plugged it in and then his shop vac into that and said come on. We went to the area he had swept and he started vacuuming all the cracks and crevices and knocking loose rocks with his hammer as he went along. He pried one chunk of rock loose and pointed. Under that rock was a layer of gold flakes! He vacuumed them up and kept going until he had chiseled all the loose rocks out and had cleaned all the exposed bedrock we had just dug out, man it was so clean you could eat off it I think. He lifted the shop vac hose up with it still running over his head “Gets any gold caught in the riffles of the hose down into the vac” he said. He then turned it off and carried it up to the wash bin, took the lid off and poured all the sand, rock and gold into one of the pans. He handed it to me and said go ahead and take it all the way down, let’s see what the rocks had been trying to hide from us. I started panning and added more detergent to the pan because this was some really fine stuff and I didn’t want any to float away on me (adding a couple of drops of soap makes “wet water” and keeps really fine gold from floating on surface, this is from the surface tension of water and before adding the detergent I could see flakes floating, as soon as the soap hit you could see the ripple and they all sank). In just a few minutes I was stunned again because there was a lot of gold in the pan. We weighed it up, just a hair under a ¼ ounce! I looked at the 30 or so feet of tailings where I had reburied the bedrock as I was moving down the hill. I knew I had to dig it all up again and clean that rock like he had just showed me! He then took me over to the spinner, and low and behold the catch basin had gold and a lot of it! He shut it off and gave it to me to weigh, exactly 7/8th of an ounce! Over an ounce in an hour of work! (I am going into a lot of detail of these first couple of days with Tom, because he was an integral part of the following summer and you will get an idea of how we worked together, became great friends and formed a business partnership). Since this was technically public land anyone could dig anywhere they wanted, it was just kind of courtesy that one didn’t dig too close to an area where someone else was digging. With his tools, I knew I would do much better and faster than I had been, so I offered a fifty-fifty split with him on everything we found and also on fuel etc. He laughed and said it’s your glory hole so you should get 60 percent. It’s your equipment I said, so let’s go fifty-fifty. OK, That’s a deal he said but starting on the next run, this one is all yours. I told you he was a nice guy didn’t I? We worked about another 5 hours that afternoon until the sun was just starting to settle. We vacuumed, hammered and dug up another 30 feet of bedrock coming up with 5 and 7/8th ounces of the good stuff, or almost 3 ounces each for 5 hours work. A very impressive day to say the least, but not the best we would have. He didn’t have any family and said if I wanted to go home for Christmas, he would stay at the camp if I wanted to go be with the family. I told him I wanted to go into town and call again but that I had already told them I wouldn’t be home. He told me it was my choice. But that if he still had family he would be home for Christmas. I thought about it and agreed, I trusted him not to work it and take the gold and skip out (plus one side of me thought it had about run its course, it had slowed down the last 2 runs we had made and I really did want to be home for Christmas). I didn’t think he was going to work the hole and then run since he lived on his claim that was touching this spot. So I loaded my truck with all my equipment and left the tent, camp stove, table and wash bin there with him and wished him a Merry Christmas. I hit the road about 8PM and was home at 6 Christmas morning. To end this section of the story, Let me say I am glad I went home, I never missed a Christmas with Mom in my entire life and hers ended just 9 years later at the age of 55. I enjoyed the day with the family, told stories of my adventures and of my partnership with Tom, catnapped, took two showers and had the best home made meal I can ever remember having, even to this day. I left at about 11PM Christmas night and asked Dad to pick up 2 more square pans and bring them up with him next weekend for Tom. He had said he was coming up again next weekend to see how we were doing. I stopped and got a few little things for Tom on my way back to the site and got there at about noon the day after Christmas. The final part (part three) will be posted in a couple of days after I read my notes and condense them into a couple of pages or so that will sum up the rest of my adventures with Tom and my Dog, Athena in the New year and Summer of 1984. Until then, Happy Hunting! Rick
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librtyhead Original500© Member
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You were 24 in 84 maybe? Are you 49 now?..great story by the way I like it!
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CROCKofCOINS Guardian1000© Member
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librtyhead wrote: You were 24 in 84 maybe? Are you 49 now?..great story by the way I like it! Looks like 18 in 1984: >>a dumb 18 year old heading towards the Rocky Mountains in November.<< Good story Sir! Jerry
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librtyhead Original500© Member
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OOPS
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RICKC300 Guardian1000© Member
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Correct I was 18, the smelters bars (maybe miners bars?) were cast silver and weighed a little over one pound each. I sold them a few years later when money got tight. Looking back, I wish I had offered them to a museum or something else instead. Anyway, they each weighed just a hair over one pound and they were poured in batches, you could see lines where the hot metal was poured on already cooled hardened silver making for a layered effect. There was an assayers stamp (I think) that was simply R/A in a circle and then on the other side was a drilled hole about a 1/4 inch deep and next to it was stamped .950 which again I am assuming was the fineness. I have googled and searched the Internet many a time looking for them but have found nothing to date. As it sits right now, I am off Friday so maybe I will finish my adventure for you that evening. I have lugged 3 milk crates 1800 miles across the country full of notes, maps, and precious few photos, I thought I had photos of the bars, but apparently not. That was going to be my answer to that question, just posting a pic of them. Catch everyone later and happy hunting! Rick
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shimmy Original500© Member 
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Excellent story!!!
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Lord Marcovan Original500© Member Robertson Shinnick
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